


a far better fate than wisdom

by nextgreatadventure



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: AU, Angst, Episode: s04e08 Fugue, F/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-28
Updated: 2011-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-28 07:44:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/305510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nextgreatadventure/pseuds/nextgreatadventure
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And he wondered if it was too late to unweave his destiny from hers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a far better fate than wisdom

**Author's Note:**

> 4x08 _fugue_ au (mentions of _chimera_ , runs in the same vein as _the depths_ ). death. angst. other happy things. this is just a feelings parade because I had to figure out some way to fic out the fact that they are just so broken this season. and I starting writing this before the depths aired, so shit, feelings just intensified.
> 
> basically after fugue I was talking to some people about how damn close it was that abby didn't die, how crazy and risky magnus's idea to save her was, and how if she hadn't of made it, OH BOY. so basically here's the product of those conversations. just so everyone knows, I actually LIKE abby (minority, here, and I still wrote this). maybe I just like writing really angsty sanctuary episode tag au's?
> 
> thanks to [missparker](http://archiveofourown.org/users/missparker/pseuds/missparker) who late one night helped me make sense of this hot mess o' feelings and also to [cartography](http://archiveofourown.org/users/universe/pseuds/cartography) who was patient and lovely and encouraging (oh also she and I have decided that helen/will fic needs to be written for all the e. e. cummings poetry, so everyone: let's get on that).

-

 

 

kisses are a far better fate  
than wisdom  
-e. e. cummings

 

 

He’d lost most of the women in his life like Magnus lost Ashley: quickly, violently, on someone else’s terms.

When she finally met his gaze through the glass, the monitors had been flat lining for thirty seconds straight, and with that one long, unwavering tone, his world started to strip itself apart again.

In a bizarre burst of misplaced self-mockery he thought about how he really should have been used to this by now.

 

 

He smashed the lamp on her desk and she let him, arms folded, silent, unreadable. He’d taken his mother silently, silent as Magnus was now, and he’d taken Clara silently, hell, he’d taken Ashley silently too and he didn’t want to be silent anymore.

Magnus was connected to each of his most painful losses like an omen and she just stood there now, an omen of pain still to come, watching him destroy her office like she’d been expecting it all along. Like she’d lit the fuse years ago and hadn’t bothered to tell him that he and everyone else he’d ever love was living on borrowed time (just like she was).

Like he didn’t actually matter, like he was just a puppet to her, just another small puzzle piece, another small sacrifice in this three hundred year old game of strategy. She never listened to him unless it was convenient to her, and why should she? There was the pretense of his importance, but this had never been his war. It had always been hers alone.

Later when he’d spent all his energy, ended up a numb limbed heap on the floor, he looked up to see her offered hand and he realized that she’d been crying, too.

 

 

He doesn’t sleep and he doesn’t eat, and it feels like that aftermath of Kali all over again except it’s different this time, it’s sharper, and this time he has someone to blame. This time he _remembers_. He starts to convince himself that she’s made him into Hermes, another acolyte, another pawn standing fooled, bewitched and willing on the front lines of her grander plan.

Helen Magnus isn’t what you’d expect a harbinger of death to look like (act like, sound like, _feel_ like). She has kind eyes and soft hands and a strong heart. But that’s exactly what she is and so that’s exactly what he is and he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to do this for much longer. For the first time since he met her (and even before that, because he knew without knowing that he’d been waiting for her for a very, very long time) he started to believe Addison and all the others who’d warned him that Helen Magnus was not what she appeared to be.

And he wondered if it was too late to unweave his destiny from hers. If he still had time to decide or if the decision had already been made the moment they locked eyes across her desk four years ago.

 

 

Weeks pass and a night comes that he finds her hovering outside of his bedroom door. She has the knuckles of one hand against her lips and those of the other clenched tight against her stomach and it’s the most vulnerable he’s ever seen her but somehow, it just makes him angrier.

“What do you want?” he snaps, and she looks up at him with eyes dark and fathomless as always. She steps into the room and closes the door behind her.

She looks at him for a very long time before she speaks again.

“I want you to hurt me.”

He stares at her like he’s going to ask her to repeat herself even though he’d heard every word like a pin prick, but then she goes on.

“Or scream at me, or berate me, or whatever you need to do, Will. We can’t go on like this.”

It had only been a few days since she’d been wiped raw by Worth’s virtual hell and it doesn’t escape Will that she hasn’t been sleeping or eating, either. He doesn’t know what Worth had done to her in there but it seemed like those ghosts that were constantly on her heels had finally broken even, and the purplish rings around her eyes were proof enough of that, even without the visible tremor in her hands that hadn’t allowed her time in the lab for weeks.

The pang of guilt, the empathy, the itch to mend her isn’t quite enough to overcome him, even though for a second he’s worried his face is going to crack, that he’s going to give in to her again. For a second he’s worried he’s going to forgive her.

He reaches out instead, because he needs some control. He curls his fingers behind her neck, digs nails into her skin, lets the pad of his thumb rest against the center of her throat. When she swallows a moment later, he feels it.

“I won’t blame you if you want to squeeze,” she whispers. She doesn’t blink and he notices, besides the rings beneath them, that her eyes look grey tonight. They look grey like old steel, hard and immovable and it’s what her voice sounds like, too, but her skin is anything but metallic. It’s warm and yielding and it strikes him then, like it’s struck him so many times before, the impossible study in contrasts this woman is. Soft skin and steely eyes, mortal and immortal, human and not-quite-human. A woman who lost her own daughter but took one from another, a woman who is his mentor and his equal, his best friend and a complete stranger.

“That’s not what I want,” he says finally. “And you know it.”

She tilts her chin up, defiant. ‘“What, then?”

She looks like wants to be put out of her misery but like she’s still going down a martyr and it’s how he feels, too. He wonders how many times in the last three centuries she’s allowed another person to see her like this (it’s only fair, though, it’s just been this one time for him).

“I just want a way to deal with all of this,” he tells her, and his voice breaks the same moment his grip slackens, but before he can drop his hand she covers it with her own. Emboldened, he slowly shifts his fingers beneath hers to feel her pulse. It’s quick and alive and he feels himself start to drift away again, but this time she drifts with him and this time, he doesn’t really mind. He’s got her heart right here and he figures that’s collateral enough.

He can recall from textbooks and experience how to deal with loss and how to mourn, how to display and deal with grief appropriately. He’s done it all before. But for some reason, right now, in this moment, he can’t remember a thing about any of it and all he feels like doing is letting go, letting himself spiral down.

“You’ve experienced so much more loss in your life than even I had at your age, Will. You have to know how sorry I am.”

 _I’m broken,_ he thinks. _I’m broken and_ you’re _broken and we need to be fixed. I broke you and you broke me and--_

“This is no way to live,” Will agrees, belatedly, and he watches her lose a quiet battle with the tears in her eyes. Nobody has ever cried as quietly as he’s seen Helen Magnus cry and he wonders if it hurts her anymore, the way she has to hold in every scream, or if she’s too numb to care.

He hasn’t spoken with her about the possibility of leaving the Sanctuary, mostly because he doesn’t even know if he wants that to be an option. Where else would he go? Back to the FBI, to take up his dead girlfriend’s position? Maybe if it were just Magnus he’d be leaving, but no. He has responsibilities at the Sanctuary. He’s made a whole life here and even if it revolves around her most of the time, it revolves around other things, too.

So he could distance himself from her and the Sanctuary, physically, knowing he’d never get away from her in his head or in his heart, or he could stay. He could stay and keep this life and he could look at her each morning and each night and try not to see her face staring at him from beyond that glass every single time. He could stay and hope that whatever she's been keeping from him will come out into the open before he has to rip it from her himself.

He could tear himself away and hope he has enough left of himself to start over, or he could just accept this whole destiny thing, the one he doesn’t know if he wants anymore. The one where he stands beside Helen Magnus and doesn’t ever let anyone get too close while they fight a never-ending battle at the crossroads.

Their bodies have inched closer and Magnus has brought her other hand up to cup his jaw, but tentatively, carefully, like he’s razor-sharp or white-hot, like he’s something that might hurt her, or like she’s something that has hurt _him_.

He doesn’t move, doesn’t protest.

She leans in, kisses his lips softly. When she leans away, he knows he’s made his decision. His heart feels steadier but his hand beneath hers is the only thing anchoring him, and it’s not because of her kiss, because her lips are as familiar to him as any other part of her, and it’s not the way they press to his skin (for the first time). It’s the way those lips pull away from him. Slowly, like she doesn’t want to move because she knows that this moment will be over soon and he’ll go back to hating her. He’ll go back to distrusting her and that’s the one thing she never really wanted, the one thing she’d brought on herself because she’d had to make a choice between something awful and something impossible.

“I can’t ever promise you terrible things won’t happen,” she says as they lean their foreheads together. “I can’t even promise that they won’t ever be my doing.”

Will grits his teeth. He can feel himself starting to cry, the sort of welling pain that comes on like a tidal wave. For a moment he thinks he’s changed his mind, that he _does_ want to hurt her so that she can feel what he’s feeling, but then he realizes she already does. More than anything, he just wants her to kiss him again.

“But I can tell you that I do love you,” she continues, and her voice is sinking slowly into a whisper, trembling a little because this is the first honest thing she’s told him in a long, long time. “And that I’m about two years too late in telling you that.”

He breathes in and everything smells like her, whether he wants it to or not.

He loves her too but he’s not going to give her that sword, so he says nothing, and she tightens her grip on the back of his neck like she knows it anyway.

“You don’t have to forgive me. I wouldn’t.” She pauses and bites her lip, and he feels her whole body tense. Whatever she’s about to say is going to hurt coming out, something scalding on an already sore throat. “And you don’t have to stay. I would never make you stay. I never have.”

What she’s not saying is that she needs him like he needs (doesn’t want to need) her, that if he does walk away it’ll be the last time she ever takes a chance like this again.

He doesn’t know how to forgive her and he doesn’t know how not to need her, how not to love her or not respect her or not take comfort in the fact that she’s everything he ever lost. That she fills in all of his empty spaces, and then keeps ripping more of them open, fills them in again, marking him hers just a little more each time. He needs to take control of this and she needs to concede, she needs to be _his_ , too, or else none of this will be worth it. But he doesn’t have any experience getting through something like this. He doesn’t know how to make her give in and come closer and he doesn’t know how to make her promise to never, ever push him away. None of his talents, no painstakingly gathered tool can help him here. He’s wandering blind and he feels like if he reaches for her again it’ll be like reaching for more weight to drown himself with.

So he just stops. He stops feeling. He stops thinking.

“Kiss me again.”

That something between them is broken and off balance is clear because she does immediately, unhesitatingly as he asks.

She pulls him to her mouth and she kisses him, opens her mouth under his. He grips her neck, hard, sucks her bottom lip between his teeth and she starts to make these low, muffled noises that sound like little cries of release.

Helen Magnus has lost more people in her life than he’ll ever meet and she’s been through more hell than he can ever even pretend to understand and that’s why he takes a little of what she gives and leaves it at that, just like he always has, even though right now it seems like she’s offering him everything she’s ever had. She has never, ever done that before and it’s tempting, so tempting, to take more.

So he waits and he lets her lead and when she doesn’t stop, he keeps going. He lets consequences and I should know betters fall away, he lets this spiral down the way he wanted to spiral down, the way she already has. He takes much, much more from her than he should, but she’s taken much, much more than she should have from him and so he can’t bring himself to feel badly about it.

He knows this Helen isn’t well because she’d never really do this, and this whole situation is too surreal, the way her tongue feels sliding slowly against his. This Helen is scared and more than a little desperate. She needs to keep him here until they can figure out a way to be all right and he _should_ be the stand up guy he’s always been, he should be her compass, nothing but good intentions and respect for her and uncanny foresight about how badly this will end. But he’s not any of these things right now.

He lets her do what she’s going to do, he doesn’t stop her, because on some level he knows that she knows exactly what she's doing. He gives in, he’s rough with her when he shouldn’t be, and it feels just as surreal as everything else.

But maybe he does need to hurt her, after all. Maybe he needs to suck at the skin below her hipbone until it’s raw, until she bucks beneath him, until his teeth bruise that soft skin for weeks to come (he bears her marks on his skin every single day).

She still won’t ask him to stay and she will not try to sway him with any more of her cryptic words but he asked her for this, and so yes, she’ll use her mouth, she’ll use her body to keep him close. They need to connect, and it’s the only place they’re really connected anymore, the only thing they can (try to) control. He can feel it in the way she touches him, that she’s asking him not to leave but that she’s also asking him to be okay with the secrets she’s kept from him, and he can feel it all in the way she lets him touch her. He thinks maybe she’s sorry. For everything.

There is a bed that they bump into but they hardly feel it, hardly care, because it’s not about how soft something is beneath them, it’s about how close they can come to one another like this without shattering.

She straddles his hips and slips her shirt over her head, messy hair, dark eyes. He slides his hands beneath her skirt and everything else, no preamble, just fingers that know exactly what they want.

“Is this for me?” he asks, breathless, because she’s already so willing and ready and his fingertips slip, slide, and her head tilts back like he’s making her feel something.

“Yes,” she gasps, but he can’t tell if she’s lying or not and he doesn’t know if he even cares, as long as she’s talking to him like this, finally. As long as she _feels_ like this.

He wants, has wanted from the moment she opened this place up to him and from all those little moments that she'd allowed him past her walls, to be close to her. Closer. She has needed to stop pushing and let him in for a million different reasons, in a million different ways, and she has needed to learn to compromise for him even if she wouldn't ever compromise for anyone else.

And yet now he can't trust himself not to take advantage and sabotage it and ruin it and maybe now it's too late. Too broken. Maybe she waited too long and maybe he didn’t wait long enough and maybe this is how it all ends between them.

They trail their fingernails down swaths of skin and they each wind the other's body round and round until it breaks, and as they gasp in heaving breaths afterward, they're both thinking that it was never suppose to be like this.

 

 

They fall into an exhausted half-sleep and after a few hours or days or he can’t even tell passes, he feels her stir beside him. She’s growing restless and her body starts to curve into his again, her lips nudge his throat exposed, kissing hotly down the length of his neck. Her chin and lips and mouth and teeth drag down his body and the searing pleasure-pain nearly knocks the breath from his lungs. He takes fistfuls of her hair and pulls while she lingers above him and marks him all over again.

He thinks about how they are never coming back from this, and if they ever figure out a way to heal they’re going to have to figure out a way to share a bed and a heart, too, because they’ve both just played their trump card. Magnus has played her entire hand, the only one she has left, without even know what it is, exactly, or what it will be. But he knows that any Helen, no matter how unwell, will handle all the consequences, will masterfully navigate even the darkest, most tumultuous waters. Things are still crumbling between them, and they can both feel that distance getting closer, but at least they’re together. At least they are wrapped around one another and at least there isn’t that physical space between them, too.

Except in the morning, he wakes and she’s not there. He passes her later in the corridor by her office and she’s got an angry red mark just off-center of her throat that she’s not bothering to cover. She looks at him and the look is painful, so painful, because nothing is all right. Because they want so badly for things to be all right and they love each other too much to keep pretending like someday they will be.

He feels tired and irreparable and he reaches for her hand anyway, but she escapes his grasp, keeps walking, and he wonders how many more wounds must be inflicted and healed between them, how much more blood must be spilt and wiped clean again until they’re both whole.

 

 

-


End file.
